This invention relates generally to digital signal processors.
A digital signal processor is an integrated circuit designed for high speed data manipulation. Digital signal processors may be used in audio, communications, image manipulation, and other data acquisition and data control applications.
Digital signal processors may use a modified Harvard architecture with dual ported memory where two data address buses are used to fetch data items from two different vectors located in memory at the same time. By accessing two data items at the same time, the computation units may be continuously fed with data. Dual ported memory is typically implemented using several banks of single ported memory. In such implementations, two data fetches may be done in one cycle when the data that must be accessed are in different memory banks that may be accessed at the same time.
As a result, when the data to be accessed is in the same memory bank, then this parallel processing is not possible. As a result, extra cycles may be required.
Thus, there is a need for better ways to access data in digital signal processing.